Hip Hop education: OSU professor curates exhibit focused on genre’s art influence

“It took eight people to lift those shoes,” one of the museum guards told us as we headed to the upstairs galleries for the museum’s newest special exhibition. “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” is on view at the CAC (Cincinnati Art Museum) through Sept. 29. It’s fascinating, entertaining and lots of fun. The giant sneakers reinforce an important point made by the show’s on-site curator, Jason Rawls, The Ohio State University’s first-ever assistant professor of Hip Hop. “Grandmaster Caz said hip hop didn’t invent anything. Hip hop reinvented everything,’” Rawls said quoting American rapper, songwriter and DJ Curtis Brown, better known as Grandmaster Caz. The show’s mission, Rawls explained, is to share with visitors the variety of ways in which the hip hop mentality uses the resources at hand in innovative ways. The huge athletic shoes in the downstairs entryway are a perfect case in point. “It’s about taking the resources that you have and creating what you need.” How it began Hip hop originated in the mid-1970s as a cultural expression of Black, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx youth. Call-and-response chants, followed by rap rhymes and lyrics overlaid on tracks, formed the foundations of the...